Thursday, 5 June 2014

A Church of Global warming "synod" in the Hudson Bay Lowlands

An assembly of the clergy and sometimes also the laity in a diocese or other division of a particular church.
(Definition of a synod, Google)

If anybody had any doubts about the climate change establishment being a religious sect, read the description below of a gathering of climat change tourists in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. The proceedings, which are called "synods", are led by Dr. Peter Kershaw, a University of Alberta scientist:

"My big hope is always that a group goes away with the feeling that they've made a contribution," says Kershaw, who has hosted dozens of such synods.
Indeed, we each now counted ourselves ambassadors of awareness.
Furthermore, the group had transformed from strangers to people who could work, have fun and learn together despite disparate sensibilities, ages, and backgrounds. The reasons too easily found for not getting along with someone elsewhere are routed in such situations by the camaraderie of understanding and revelation. --

For example, Lisa Silliman-French, a 48-year-old college instructor from Texas, was on her fifth Earthwatch trip. She'd started with leatherback sea turtles in Trinidad and subsequently voyaged to Central America and Africa on endangered animal projects. "I love giving my time to those kind of things," she'd shared one night. "It connects you; opens your mind but narrows your focus — you know? Doing something keeps you from getting too frustrated, where you could drive yourself insane and not make a difference."Her first trip had been alone, but she'd gone on Earthwatch trips with friends, relatives, even people met on previous ones. Churchill offered the possibility of seeing polar bears, true, but mostly she'd wanted to get far enough north to see an environment truly impacted by climate change. "I can't understand people who won't open a door to the idea," she tells me. "It's like they're on a narrow path with no lights. I'm hoping to open the door a crack for, like, 50 people in my life and pass it on. Look at Kaylee—I met her in an airport on my way home from an Earthwatch trip; she asked what we were doing and when I told her, she lit right up."Kaylee Spacizek, Environmental Sustainability Manager for Pepsi Co.'s global operations based in Houston, was indeed kneeling with us on the tundra swatting mosquitoes. "I'm trained as a chemical engineer," she says. "When I started (at Pepsi) I had zero environmental knowledge, but seeing An Inconvenient Truth changed my life. Since then it has been one big revelation after another. But it's difficult to converse with co-workers about climate change, and that's a large part of why I'm here."